Utilities provide commodities such as electricity, gas and water to the public, preferably at the least possible cost to each consumer. However, each year utilities are subject to increasing costs due to distribution losses. While certain amounts of electricity, gas, water and other commodities are lost due to the technical limitations of the various distribution systems, large quantities of these commodities are stolen. These “non-technical distribution losses” are typically written off by the various utilities as unrecoverable due to a general lack of evidence available to prove energy theft. Unfortunately, such theft and losses have become an increasing problem for many utilities.
For water utilities, theft from fire hydrants for construction projects and the like is an increasing problem. Frequently, a discharge nozzle cap of a conventional fire hydrant is removed from the bonnet of the hydrant and a control valve is moved to the open position by a non-utility person to allow water flow from the fire hydrant. This theft poses a public health and welfare threat as the municipality's primary water source for the community can be reduced below safe levels. For example, an open flowing fire hydrant causes a significant decrease in the pressure of the water supply main. This results in an inability to fight fires within an entire section or loop part of the supply main grid as generally all of the nearby fire hydrants on that portion of the grid are rendered useless.
Automated meter reading for consumption rate of different utility resources such as water, gas or electricity has become more desirable compared to the methods using meters that require manual reading and recording of the consumption levels. One type of automated “local” means of collecting meter reading requires an operator to be in close physical proximity of the meter to obtain the meter reading, such as, for example by using touch read methodologies, and transporting the data to a central computer.
Another type of automated meter reading is based on collection of data by telephone lines or radio transmission. The meter reading, in both cases, may be collected through the phone lines connected to the meter, i.e., phone read, or communicated to a portable hand-held computer. The radio based meters, such as those provided in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,652,877 and 4,782,341 issued to Gray and incorporated herein by reference, were more widely used since the reading could be collected as an operator drove by the meter (drive-by system), or in combination with the touch read system, be read manually. The radio read is particularly desirable in areas where the meter, specifically the water meter, is inside a pit at a distance from the building and away from a power source. However, in such systems, the antenna was disposed outside of the meter and was hardwired to the mechanical register through the meter housing so the signals passing from the register to the RF transmitter were not wireless.
In the noted methodologies, the collected data from each utility meter must be transported to a central computer and compiled for billing, statistical or any other services that the utility companies may provide to their customers. Each of the aforementioned automated meter reading techniques still requires a large amount of manpower and is susceptible to errors in entry and transportation of data. Moreover, the utility companies cannot exercise any control or provide notifications to their customers without using additional manpower, cost and potentially less reliable means of communication.
Conventionally, each utility meter is associated with a particular address to which utility companies associate the complied collected data from the particular utility meter. However, in the water utility market, fire hydrants are not associated with a specific billing address. Rather, they are spread about a water utilities supply grid in accordance with appropriate municipal code. Thus, stolen water from a fire hydrant is not typically captured and billed by conventional metering systems.
Typically, water utilities attempt to have using parties pay for the water that they use from the water supply grid by having the using party mount a portable fire hydrant meter onto the fire hydrant. Conventional portable fire hydrant meters operate on the basis of a mechanical odometer that identifies the consumption of the water consumed. These fire hydrant meters can use electronic reading of the odometer wheels. The odometer is typically read at the end of the job and the difference between the end-of-job reading and the initial reading determines the amount of utility water used. As one would expect, the user pays for the water used. The prior art fire hydrant meters provided no ability to restrict the amount of water consumed by the user. Further, they did not provide an ability to monitor the actual real-time consumption of water.
Consequently, a need exists for an improved system for automated water utility resource measurements, data collection and exercise of control and notification of water hydrant water usage.